M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions- Special Feature #03 / Yuri Kono and Takehiro Ohya “The Twilight Future: Exploring Publicness”

A media project to speculate and discuss about GHOST IN THE SHELL “M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions-.”

 

The theme of ISSUE #03 is “Boundaries.”

 

In “The Twilight Future: Exploring Publicness,” a dialogue between Yuri Kono, a scholar who has extensively examined the history of Japanese political thought from Yukichi Fukuzawa to Masao Maruyama, and Takehiro Ohya, a legal philosopher and the supervisor of this special feature, readers are invited to explore the interplay of ideas.

 

Tracing the evolution of perspectives on the state and corporations as depicted in the Ghost in the Shell series, which began just before the collapse of the Cold War and continues to this day, the two discuss phenomena such as the weakening of the nation-state and the rise of global corporations in the real world. Their conversation extends further to encompass topics such as the evolution of the Japanese language from early modern to modern times, as well as theories surrounding the Singularity and their various interpretations.

 

Underscoring their dialogue is a persistent sense of decline—both in the concept of publicness that underpins society and in the cohesion of collective structures. This pervasive sense of societal erosion fosters an apocalyptic perception of technology and society, only to paradoxically render even such bleak outlooks fragile and prone to collapse. Readers are invited to engage with this downbeat yet intriguingly offbeat discussion.

 

It is only available in Japanese, the English version is coming soon.

 

Illustration: studio TRUE